We live in a difficult age, when employees are encouraged to bring their “whole selves” to work – your personalities, backgrounds and vulnerabilities. Except that company codes of conduct then ask that you leave potentially troublesome things like personal opinions and beliefs at the front door.

And yet every successful company needs dissent. It’s the stuff of airport lounge business books that the most valuable employees aren’t the ones who always agree, but the ones who put their hand up in meetings to make an effective challenge. How else do you drive innovation than by disagreement?

The innovation trap

It’s never easy to go against the grain within an organisation, but it can pay dividends. Just look at the late Steve Jobs (millions of tech bros still do). This year, Apple marks its 50th anniversary. Its “Think Different” motto hints at how it became one of the world’s largest companies today, its visionary CEO rejecting traditional managerialism in favour of creative, often abrasive leadership – even when it got him fired and frozen out of the company for a decade.

Being a “team player” means avoiding friction, but staying silent can be a career-stopper, too. In an era of bubble mentalities, you don’t distinguish yourself by following the herd.

Ever since the advent of social media, it has been possible to live exclusively in an information bubble of your own creation, one populated by like-minded individuals. Hashtag no debate! Consequently, ideas that align with pre-existing beliefs are amplified, and socially sanctioned responses are reinforced. It’s a feedback loop that confers and rewards conformity – and the same goes for the pub as the boardroom.

Breaking the bubble

In the workplace, Millennials and Gen Z have often been schooled into going along with orthodoxies just to get ahead – a survival technique for the professional precariat. This habit of workplace compliance is mirrored in their social lives; while they are admirably willing to unite for social justice or authenticity, that same collective drive can risk becoming a new kind of herd mentality. From the boardroom to the group chat, the result is the same: the individual voice gets lost in the crowd.

The psychological safety required to voice a dissenting opinion

Dr Sunny Lee

Not only is mono-thinking bad for business, it’s terrible news for the millions of middle managers of tomorrow. Within a decade, the largest cohort in the workplace will be Gen Alpha, those born since 2010. Unlike their Zoomer “elders”, who were the first generation to grow up with the internet as a part of daily life and who never knew a purely analogue world, Gen Alphas will be AI natives.

Plugged in from the moment their nervous parents give them a smart device, they will have only ever known constant connectivity. As they enter the workforce, they will require leaders who can counter that high-tech upbringing, and all the digital anxieties that come with it, with human connections.

Thanks to their unprecedented digital literacy, Gen Alphas have grown up with a wider range of views, and the tools to fact-check them, at their fingertips. This instant access to global information means they are less likely to accept ‘because I said so’ as a valid answer. Combined with a desire for immediate gratification, they are on course to be more questioning of accepted norms and challenging to authority – disrespectful, even – than any generation since the Xers now in senior management.

With Gen A having been raised with “gentle parenting” styles – meaning they were rarely given a blunt “no”… – teachers are reporting higher levels of defiance, disrespect and lower attention spans, as this generation challenges traditional rules and hierarchies. It’ll be for those middle managers of tomorrow to harness that… let’s call it exuberance, and perhaps even put it to good use.

Friction as fuel

Simon Sinek, the ethnographer and leadership expert, says we should view conflict arising from dissent and disagreements within an organisation not as a problem, but as a necessary tool for growth – for the individual and their employer. “Learning the skills of difficult human interaction is a massive opportunity,” he has said, advocating that workplace disagreements be handled by leaning into the tension with curiosity rather than aggression.

And to that end, University College London might have just the thing.

In its bicentenary year, UCL extends Disagreeing Well, an initiative to help transform how society approaches difficult conversations in a polarised world, and how to better equip ourselves to have them. Its practical toolkit will surely be a godsend for many company bosses, who will find much to take away from its podcast series about constructive conflict resolution, and the skills videos full of expert insights. If you want to pick up tips and tricks on voicing a dissenting opinion within a team, or how to challenge management decisions, help is just a click away…

Why “disagreeing well” is a learnable skill rather than an innate personality trait

Dr Sunny Lee

As the Independent’s deputy comment editor, I navigate the choppy waters of competing opinions and opposing points of view every day. I found plenty in the Disagreeing Well programme to engage with and to help realign aspects of my professional approach. It came as a surprise when I completed the excellent online quiz that determines your “disagreement style”.

Out of the five possibilities – in life, we are either the Organiser, the Expert, the Mediator, the Caretaker or the Challenger – I came out as the latter, with a “conflict style” categorised as direct, convincing, emotion-driven and pragmatic. My strengths are that I can be “assertive, persuasive, passionate and outcome-focused”.

I have blind spots, too: I can appear to be confrontational, dismissive, irrational or transactional. (When I read that, I heard Moira Rose’s classic line in Schitt’s Creek: “…But it was also wrong.”) As a dear colleague I showed these findings to said: “They missed out ‘A***hole’…”

When I next have a difficult exchange – there’ll be a few along in a minute… – I shall try a simple technique suggested by Mia Forbes Pirie, UCL collaborator and international conflict mediator, in her engaging Disagreeing Well video series. She swears it is a game-changer, and is used by FBI mediators and diplomats the world over – and all you have to do is “reflect back what you’ve heard the other person say”.

She explains: “You simply repeat one word of what the other person has said that you disagree with. They say: ‘The moon is purple, with pink and blue dots’, and you say: ‘Purple…’ That way, you give them the space to respond and expand their perspective, to help you understand more. It also gives them the option of correcting themselves.

“But it shows people that you’ve listened to them, that you’re paying attention to them – and, in most cases, people visibly relax when you do this. As human beings, we fundamentally crave being loved and respected.”

It’s such a neat idea, the kind of useful nugget that the Disagreeing Well toolkit is full of. I can’t wait to try it out on the person who called me the A-word.

UCL’s Disagreeing Well programme looks at how we can coexist in a diverse community where many differences of opinion are passionately held and personally felt. By approaching disagreements with respect, curiosity and a desire to learn, we can nurture understanding and solve shared problems.

Find out more about the campaign, including past and upcoming events, and free skills-based resources, on UCL’s Disagreeing Well website.